MEADE 


4LB 

959 

Copy 1 


/ 

PROFESSOR ELIOT’S 

$nanpral l^kess. 


M.DCCO.LYI. 











®|t xrf tlrt |ast anti % Scholar nf % |«sm. 


AN 


INAUGURAL ADDRESS 


TO THE 








^uftltsTjcir request of tijr £tuimtts. 



HARTFORD. 

PRESS OF CASE, TIFFANY AND COMPANY. 

HA 


MDCCOLVI. 





























* 

























1 


’ * 


if 

* * 

* ‘> *9 



































Trinity College, > 

39 Brownell Hall, October 9th, 1856. j 

To Professor Eliot. 

Dear Sir : — The students of Trinity College having 
listened with much pleasure, and we trust profit, to the oration delivered by 
yourself in the chapel on last Tuesday evening, and desiring that greater 
publicity should be given to it, in order that those who had not an opportunity 
of hearing, may enjoy the perusal of the same, would respectfully request a 
copy for publication. 

We are very truly yours, 

W. WOODRUFF NILES, ) 

EDWARD G. BUTLER, [■ Committee. 

WILLIAM HENRY BENJAMIN,) 


Trinity College, October 10th, 1856. 

Dear Sirs : — The substance of the address which I had the pleasure of 
reading to the students of Trinity College, was delivered by me, some time 
ago, upon another occasion. But its present form is one unused and unthought 
of, until suggested by the opportunity of speaking to you. I regard it, there- 
fore, as wholly yours, whether published or unpublished ; and if you desire 
its publication, it is at your service. 

I am not insensible to the honor now done me, any more than I have been 
or am insensible to all the proofs of good will and confidence which 1 have 
received from the students, since I came among them. 

Believe me to be 

their and your 

obliged and faithful friend, 

Messrs W. W. Niles, SAMUEL ELIOT. 

E. G. Butler, 

Wm. Henry Benjamin. 




ADDRESS. 


Students of Trinity College : 

Were not the Chair which I have the honor to fill, 
a new one to the College, I might have hesitated at 
asking you to meet me in any other place than where 
we have already met. But on the establishment of a 
professorship, hitherto unorganized, though not wholly 
unoccupied, it seems to me a natural thing that we 
should come together, not merely for the recitation or 
the lecture, but to take counsel with one another, to 
recognize our common interests, to discern our com- 
mon aims. 

On one or two points, it may be well for me to 
explain myself at the outset. I must not, in the first 
place, seem to you to be speaking as if the professor- 
ship of History and Literature were the only one or 
the chief one in the Institution, — as if its occupant were 
especially entitled to address you. No one can be 
farther than I from thinking this to be the case. Nor 
must I appear to be substituting any words of mine 


6 


in place of the labors elsewhere begun by you. These 
labors, and these only, are the courses to be laid day 
by day, until the structure, whereon our hopes are set, 
rises firm and eminent. I do not even propose to 
spread out my own building plans. It is too soon, in 
such an enterprise, to mark out the position of every 
wall or the height of every tower ; the ground must be 
more surely tested, the laborers — I speak of myself as 
well as you — more thoroughly tried, before we can 
presume to say how much or how little we can do; 
whether we shall raise a hamlet or a cathedral. 

But there is one thing that we can determine; we 
could have determined it the first day we met. I 
mean the spirit in which we are to labor. It is of this 
that I wish to speak. I can do so without forestalling the 
result* or interfering with the course of our common 
studies. I can do so without arrogating to myself or 
to my position one jot more influence than we deserve 
or than we possess. But whether I can do so in a 
manner to satisfy myself or you, is another question. 

I need not say that it is a solemn subject. Above 
all labors, above all purposes of man, there lies a firma- 
ment, so to speak, of his own creation, of which his 
motives, if they be true, constitute the shining suns, or 
if they be false, make up the midnight clouds. Like all 
others of his race, the scholar walks in light or in 
darkness, according to the skies which he has made his 
own. With the right impulse, he follows a path upon 
which there will unquestionably be difficulties to meet, 


7 


disappointments to endure, perhaps but little, in a 
human point of view, to gain; yet, in the sharpest 
ascent, at the humblest bend, there is one thing that 
never fails him, — the radiance of the objects on which 
he has fixed his eyes. He, on the other hand, who has 
reached the most glittering distinctions of learning, 
and with the rarest reverses, may still dwell in an at- 
mosphere black with his own perversions, his vision 
darker, perhaps, than that of the most unlearned, the 
most obscure. The success of a scholar is no criterion 
of his power, still less of his truth. We have to look 
behind the pageantry of learning in order to discover 
the reality. 

I do not design to speak of the unreal. Unmasking 
a false prophet is never so inspiring as reverencing a 
true one. Yet there is something to lose in a monoto- 
nous reverence even of true men ; their characteristics 
escape us, their best influences fail us, if we do not set 
them in their proper rank amid the host to which 
they belong. Time and varying circumstance make 
very different scholars of those whose powers may be 
equally great, of those whose ends may be equally 
lofty. Let us penetrate into these divisions. Let us 
turn our thoughts toward a few names, lustrous all, 
but lustrous in different degrees, and from the contem- 
plation of their times, their aspirations and their achieve- 
ments, derive some firm conviction as to the best 
models, the safest guides for ourselves, 


8 


The subject of my address may be called the Scholar 
of the Past and the Scholar of the Present. 

The lineage of scholars begins far back in antiquity. 
Prom the remoter Orient, whose learning was all thickly 
veiled, along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, 
where the veils were lifted, if not removed, to Greece 
and the Occident, in which many of the fairer propor- 
tions of wisdom were disclosed, we trace the succession 
of seers, philosophers, and scholars. How much we 
owe to them need not be told. Nor is it worth while, 
on the other hand, to dwell upon the imperfections 
attending their pursuit or their transmission of truth. 
Their function was to sustain the exertions, and, at the 
same time, to demonstrate the infirmities of unaided, 
that is, comparatively unaided humanity. 

The ancient ages drew to a close. Above almost 
every land in which scholars had appeared, there ex- 
tended the giant dominion of Rome. The charge of 
reducing the broken nations around her was nearly ful- 
filled. That of subduing her own race by corruptions 
and conflicts, was in the process of execution. Amidst 
the shocks of arms at home and abroad, learning had 
found only feeble expression ; amidst the hosts of war- 
riors on native and foreign soil, scholars had found 
only precarious place. “ Leave them their books,” 
cried the Gothic invader of Greece at a later day, “and 
the hand accustomed to these things will never wield 
the soldier’s arms!” So the Romans shrank from the 


9 


pursuits of peace as if in fear of unfitting themselves for 
the pursuits of war. But was the scourge of antiquity, 
the wolf-nurse of bloody conquerors and vindictive 
citizens, to produce no gentler offspring ? Was there 
to be no Roman deserving the title and performing the 
duty of the scholar ? 

Our answer is the name of Cicero. Born near the 
beginning of the final century before our era, he came 
in time to test what the scholar of the ancient world 
could accomplish at the last, as well as what the scholar 
of Rome could do at the height of the Roman sway. 
To this he was more particularly adapted by belonging 
to a family neither the highest nor the lowest in rank, 
but of a position to represent the best class of his 
nation. The domestic influences under which his youth 
expanded, were equally propitious. Learning found no 
favor in the eyes of his grandfather, if we may judge 
from the saying ascribed to him, that “the more 
Greek” — that is, literature — “one knows, the more of 
a knave he is.” But Cicero’s father so clearly apprecia- 
ted the advantages of education, as to leave his coun- 
try-home for the sake of the scholarly pursuits to which 
he could introduce his children only in the metropolis. 

There Cicero engaged in the studies of the day. 
Through courses of belles-lettres, rhetoric and law, he 
advanced to philosophy, then the crown of learning. 
To complete his preparations, he travelled to Athens 
and the Grecian schools, the sources from which Rome 
drew her literary supplies. Cicero’s draughts were 
2 


long and deep. “I deplore the fortune of Greece/’ 
quoth one of the Greek teachers to the Roman student, 
“for you have taken from us all we had left — learning 
and eloquence.” The effect upon the ruder Romans, 
when Cicero returned among them, was much less flat- 
tering, the epithets of Greek and Pedant being jeeringly 
applied to him, save by the few who could appreciate 
his attainments. He had mastered all the combina- 
tions of literature and of science ; it remained for him 
to give his own nature utterance. 

The world around him was full of jarring sounds. 
It moved by one law, and that the law of the State, 
with which conquest and dominion were more accord- 
ant than learning. To this supremacy every Roman 
bowed. From the first to the last hour of his life, he 
looked up to the State, to its honors, to its behests, as 
to his ruling principles, the objects of all his aspira- 
tions, the rewards of all his exertions. 

To break this spell was not within the power of 
Cicero or of any other man ; nor did he ever seek to 
break it. From the opening years of his manhood, 
he entered into public avocations, pleading before the 
tribunals, haranguing the assemblies, and administering 
the offices of the State. He rose to the loftiest honors, 
then met with the profoundest reverses; but to the 
very close, he was ready to enter the lists, if without 
hope of success, not without love of exertion. Nor was 
all this from mere ambition. He acted with a conscien- 
tious sense of the services which he owed to the State, 


11 


and in fulfilling which, he was discharging his duty not 
only to the State but to the Nation, not only to the 
government but to the people, of all alike a servant 
and a benefactor. Nor did his practice fall short of his 
theory. In his youth, he defended the victims of the 
wrongs which the State was tolerating ; in his age, he 
upheld the virtues and the laws which the State was 
suffering to be overborne by its oppressors. 

His superiority in public life arose from his superior- 
ity in private life. In this, the scholar appears more 
prominently, the searcher after truth, the employer of 
reason, of faith, of love, of anything rather than the 
lust and the violence then in vogue. Hear him as he 
reproves the injustice hitherto done to learning. “ It 
has lain low,” he says, “nor has it had its contributions 
from Roman literature; let it be lifted up and hon- 
ored!” “For it is the mother of the arts,” he declares, 
“ it trains us to the worship of the gods, then to the law 
of men, then to greatness of mind.” “And he,” ex- 
claims the enthusiastic scholar, “ he who is strong in 
himself, who is neither cast down nor elated by any- 
thing external, he is wise, he is happy.” Thus pleading 
for the elevation of the individual, Cicero betrayed the 
instincts of the scholar after a truer standard than that 
of the State. He was calling his countrymen to a new 
service, to that due to themselves and to their race. 
What the effect was on them, what he led them to think 
or to do, may not be easily discerned. But it is plain 
that he raised his own nature, that he rendered it more 


12 


and more sensitive to all humane and holy things. To 
do this was to uplift the character not only of the pri- 
vate, but of the public man. It was more, it was to 
exalt the character of the State, of Rome, of the ancient 
ages, in proving the opportunities which were allowed 
to the higher powers of the man and the scholar. 

From all his loftier walks, however, Cicero returned 
to the ways of the time. Notwithstanding the ten- 
dencies that there might be to get free of the State, it 
did not loosen its hold. Even as a scholar, Cicero 
evinced the greatest zeal and the greatest success in 
those studies through which he could offer the most 
acceptable tribute to the dominion over him. In all 
his exertions as a poet and a historian, an orator and a 
philosopher, he kept his eyes upon the mistress en- 
throned in the Capitol. The charms of office, of 
authority, the insignia of the Consul, the laurels of the ' 
Imperator, were more alluring than the attractions or 
the honors of learning. He was never so contented with 
the shade or the retirement of study, as with the bustle 
and the glare of ambition ; never so much the Scholar 
as the Statesman. 

The State, as it had been in Rome, was itself passing 
away. Men of craft and of blood assailed it and en- 
shrined themselves in its place. Its doom, however, 
was not assured by intrigue or by force alone. A peace- 
fuller and a purer termination was preparing for the 
past, a peacefuller and a purer preparation for the 
future. In one of the distant provinces of Rome, the 


13 


Star arose over Bethlehem. Thenceforward the State, 
the system of man’s device and of man’s support, gave 
way gradually but continually before the Kevelation 
and the Bedemption which came from God. 

Centuries elapse, and the middle ages are at their full. 
Dark as they are called, they possess a brightness which 
the ancient ages never knew. A light has been poured 
on all the relations and duties of man, and on none 
more copiously than on those of the scholar. The mere 
surface of learning may be less glittering than in for- 
mer times ; but its inner substance has been illumined 
as it never was of old. Had the scholar been able to 
attain to what was made known, could he have pene- 
trated its deeper meaning, and elucidated its fuller in- 
spiration, he would have come nearer to the ground on 
which he could stand secure. As it was, he seemed 
sometimes sinking, and only sometimes rising, upon the 
still agitated, still beclouded waves. 

Foremost amongst the medioeval nations was France. 
Her kings had shone amidst the sovereigns, her nobles 
amidst the knights, her people amidst the toiling and 
sacrificing masses of the period. At the close of the 
eleventh century, a movement began, through which 
fresh blood was infused into the national veins. This 
was the rise of the Communes, or Municipalities, in 
which a certain amount of rights, not to say liberties, 
was secured to the citizens of the towns, hitherto the 
almost helpless instruments of their superiors. We can 


14 


conceive of the uprising of the oppressed, of their im- 
pulsive struggles, of the effect of their successes and 
their prospects upon the entire nation. 

It was at this moment that a scholar was given to 
France in Abelard. Fortunate in the circumstances of 
his birth, watched over in his youth with more than 
common parental solicitude, he entered upon an early 
manhood of cultivation and of activity. The traditions 
of his house and the inclinations of his time alike tended 
to a life of chivalry; but they were brushed aside by 
the youthful scholar. “ The more,” he said, “ I proceeded 
in my studies, the more did I cleave to them, and with 
such love as to abandon altogether the courts of Mars 
for the lap of Minerva.” Such a devotion was sure to 
lead to noble issues. 

The aspect of learning at the period was by no means 
attractive. Both the foreground and the background 
were filled up by logic and philosophy, the ministering 
attendants of the theology to which all studies were 
subservient. Abelard made his first appearance as a 
logician-errant, so to speak, travelling from place 
to place in quest of dialectical encounters with the 
masters of the art. Then taking up his abode at 
Paris, he plunged into philosophical enquiries and 
disputations, whence, after some interruptions, he 
emerged into the theological investigations which were 
occupying the best minds of the age. From these 
minds, Abelard’s had as yet given no token of being dis- 
tinguished, except perhaps by the ardent self-reliance 


15 


with which he dashed on from study to study, amazing 
his followers and confounding his adversaries. But this, 
too, was by no means unusual amongst the scholars of 
the age. 

The influences under which they all came most 
nearly, were those of the School, a name, as is com- 
monly known, which applies not to a particular institu- 
tion, but to a general system of study, never before so 
boldly planned or so boldly prosecuted. It opened the 
way, as it were, into an enchanted land, where myste- 
ries hitherto forbidden fell into the hand, and heights 
hitherto unattainable spread out beneath the feet. The 
more that was espied the more was dared, until nothing 
seemed too remote, nothing too solemn to be seized 
upon. Studies of every kind then pursued swelled to 
an extent out of all proportion to their strength of sub- 
stance. The scholar himself dilated, like the smoke from 
the casket, until he assumed a superhuman form. It was 
but a form. In reality, he was full of human feeble- 
ness, distracted by portentous efforts and confounding 
thoughts, wandering, contending, changing, until he ran 
the risk of losing all in striving to possess all. 

No career could be more congenial to the commoner 
elements in the character of Abelard. So far as he 
depended upon notoriety or adventure, so far he was 
completely satisfied with his position in the School. 
The throngs that flocked to his teachings, the still 
greater throngs that welcomed his writings, could 
scarcely have been collected by a leader in any other 


16 


cause. In no other would his own longing after excite- 
ment have been equally gratified. So adapted was he 
to the School, and the School to him, that he has often 
been represented as its founder ; but this cannot be said 
of him in relation to the School, in its general sense, to 
the system of scholastic doctrine and scholastic disci- 
pline, inasmuch as this is of older date. It is a tradition, 
however, that corroborates the fact of his having been 
distinguished in the support and the development of the 
School. 

Nor did he devote himself to the service without pur- 
poses of improving it and its followers by directing the 
ardor which it inspired toward nobler and securer 
objects than had as yet been pursued. “ True learning,” 
declared Abelard, “is the knowledge of God the 
Father ; true scholars are those who love Christ.” It 
was in harmony with all the higher elements of his nature 
that he should thus return to humility and to piety. 
At times there appears a weariness of the scholastic sys- 
tem. “I would not be a philosopher on condition of 
disputing with the Apostles,” Abelard affirmed, “nor 
such a one as must be separated from Christ, for there 
is none other name under Heaven whereby I must be 
saved.” It is true that this longing after better things 
may have been stimulated by conflicts with the ecclesi- 
astical authorities, whose dominion he was accused of 
subverting by the extremes to which he carried the 
scholastic doctrines. But such a spirit as Abelard’s does 
not yield to opposition so readily as to its own conviq- 


17 


tions. At all events his professions were new to the 
School. Its character was elevated, its purposes were 
purified by the scholar. 

It was not so easy, however, to persevere in a course so 
different from that of other men and of other scholars. 
To stand in their way, to bid them go thus far and no 
farther, was what Abelard must have done, in order to 
reach his ideal. Recall him with his fervor, his earnest 
enquiry, his impassioned sympathy, and you see a man 
who was made to join with, rather than be separated 
from the votaries of the School. He was the Scholar, 
but the Scholar merged in the Schoolman. 

The days of the School were numbered. It had 
its part to do, it had its independence to communicate 
to generation after generation, until the crisis came, and 
the oppressions of the middle ages were thrown off from 
humanity; then, however, the School vanished, leaving 
a calmer and a safer arena for the scholar. 

The Scholar of the Past is before you. You see the 
ends after which he has striven, you see the hindrances 
to his success, the oppressive influences of the State, the 
distracting impulses of the School. But are such as 
these to last ? Is the scholar to be sunk in the states- 
man or the schoolman, or in any other character besides 
his own, or besides one higher than his own ? We look 
back to clouded wastes in which the eye is confounded 
and the star lost. But there come intervals of bright- 
ness, and beyond them, as we look forward, we descry 
3 


18 


the heavens unrolling themselves, ray after ray upon 
their face, light within light in their depth, while 

“ Not the smallest orb which thou beholdest 
But in his motion like an angel sings, 

Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins.” 


The life of a scholar, not long since departed, will 
bring before us the Scholar of the Present. In turn- 
ing to him, we turn to our mother country, once the 
land of our fathers, still the land of our brothers, of 
a nation "that,” as her scholar exclaims, “ is like one of 
the chosen people of history appointed to do a great 
work for mankind” All hail to thee, England ! It is not 
one of our least obligations to thee, that thou hast given 
to learning and to humanity a scholar and a man like 
Thomas Arnold ! 

He was born a few years before the beginning of the 
present century, when old struggles were dying away in 
the effervescence of the new struggles arising to agitate 
Europe and the world. The modern ages had begun 
in strange commotions, upheavings of doctrine, convul- 
sions of goverment, wild strivings after things tried and 
untried amongst mankind ; and as they began so they 
continued. "I fear,” wrote Arnold, on attaining to 
manhood, " the approach of a greater struggle between 
good and evil than the world has yet seen, in which 
there may well happen the greatest trial to the faith of 
good men that can be imagined, if the greatest talent 
and ability are decidedly on the side of their adversaries, 


19 


and they will have nothing but faith and holiness to 
oppose to it.” The age was waiting not merely for a 
champion, but for one of a new stamp, of a new strength. 
Was he to appear in a scholar? 

Educated partly at home, partly at the public sem- 
inaries, Arnold enjoyed opportunities which he did 
not misuse. 

“ The fountains of divine philosophy 
Fled not his thirsting lips, and all of great, 

Or good, or lovely, which the sacred past 
In truth or fable consecrates, he felt and knew.” 

Beneath the dew of the dawn and the sunshine of the 
morning, he studied not only the books of the schools, 
but the deeds and the destinies of the times. Almost 
as soon as he was grown up, he took orders in the 
Church of England. 

I speak not of this, nor of any single communion 
alone, but of the entire Church of Christ, when I say 
that it is the predominating power of the modern ages. 
Broken up as it is into opposing bodies, corrupted and 
enfeebled as many of these bodies must be, it still pos- 
sesses, as a whole, the only authority at all approaching 
to universality. Its effect has long been evident. They 
who have denied it have been under its influences as 
plainly as they who have confessed it. It has aroused 
the wildest opposition, the noblest support. All hu- 
manity bears traces of the conflicts that have arisen, of 
the efforts that have glittered or gone out in darkness on 


20 


the contending sides, of the steady advances, even amid 
passion and strife, towards the day when men should 
unite and be at peace beneath the Church of Christ. 

Arnold saw the obstacles by which the day was still 
postponed. He met them with a spirit all in earnest 
to do them away forever. "I groan,” he ejaculated, 
“ over the divisions of the Church — of Christ’s Church, 
I mean — of all our evils, I think the greatest.” As 
a member of the Anglican communion, Arnold stood 
where he could stretch out his hand on either side, to 
those of his own body who were encountering one an- 
other, and then to those of other bodies, everywhere 
defiant, everywhere warring. “I would join,” he de- 
clared, “ with all who love Christ and pray to Him.” 
But how to persuade them to join him, the English 
Churchman ? How to gather the erring and the conflict- 
ing into one communion of faith and of peace ? “Make 
the Church,” he answered, “ a living Society. . . . Let 
it continually present us with impressions of the reality 
of Christ’s salvation ; and so act upon the habits of our 
life as insensibly as the air we breathe, — Christ’s own 
body, instinct with His own spirit, His people, the tem- 
ple of the Holy Ghost, His Holy Universal Church.” 

Thus restored, the Church was to be the bearer of 
the blessings for which mankind was waiting. To the 
scholar, especially, it would come preciously laden. 
His strifes would cease, his doubts would be at rest, a 
shield of peace would be before him, a heaven of trust 
would be above him. The tendencies which had been 


21 


felt to insubordination or to desertion, under the do- 
minions of former times, would vanish. What the State 
of the Ancient Ages, what the School of the Middle 
Ages, could not be, that the Church of the Modem 
Ages would be, the source of an inspiration that never 
failed, the object of an allegiance that never faltered. 
These are vague assertions; yet we may trace the 
proofs of them in Arnold’s career, in his strength and his 
serenity as a scholar. 

His great study was theology. I do not mean 
that it was the source of his highest reputation or 
of his highest power ; it resulted in no works to which 
the world bows in homage. But Arnold himself, I 
believe, would confess that from his theological stud- 
ies he derived the larger proportion of his strength 
as a scholar. All intent upon the relations of theo- 
logy to the present, esteeming it a science of life and 
of duty, rather than of antiquity or of doctrine, he 
studied the Scriptures in order to apply them to him- 
self and to his fellow-beings. Not content, therefore, 
with the common limits of investigation and of exposi- 
tion, he pressed on to the wider spaces in which know- 
ledge and faith, theology and religion, blend into one. 

Arnold addressed himself to a larger number as a 
historian. The love of history was an early passion. 
It was as broad as it was deep, embracing all periods 
with an appreciation of their mutual dependence and 
their common unity. It acknowledged as the central 
points of history the religious realities of man, of time, 
and of eternity. “My greatest desire,” he wrote at the 


22 


outset of his historical labors, “ would be in my History, 
by its high morals and general tone, to be of use to 
religion.” No historian could conceive, no reader fol- 
low such a purpose without a quickening of devotion 
and of trust. The higher the object, however, the 
more vigorous were the efforts to attain to it. Arnold 
gave way to no superstitious lassitude; but bracing 
himself for the task, pursued his researches until he had 
found every detail essential to his design, which he 
then drew out in solemn care of its proportions and 
adornments as a whole. Nor did his exertions fail of 
acknowledgment. The last days of his life had no 
earthly mark upon them that was whiter in his eyes 
than the enthusiasm awakened by his presence at 
Oxford as the professor of Modern History. Young 
men and old, the budding and the maturing scholar, 
gathered around their teacher with a reverence which 
few men, however faithful, meet with on this side the 
grave. 

Still more general, however, is the appreciation of 
Arnold as a teacher. He was in the very flush of man- 
hood when he became the head of one of the chief 
schools of England. Year after year he held the 
ground, marshalling his three hundred pupils not only 
against their own weaknesses and ignorances, but 
against those of the world into which they were soon 
to enter. The first point with him, was the spiritual 
impression which he desired to make. “ The business 
of a school-master,” he was wont to say, “ is the cure of 


23 


souls.” Doubtless the idea of this work, as well as the 
power to execute it, arose in a great degree from his 
office in the Church, which allowed him to be the 
chaplain as well as the professor of the school. But 
there can be no question that he recognized and exer- 
cised the charge of a teacher as in itself a holy calling, 
by which hearts as well as minds can be reached and 
sustained. This involved no neglect of intellectual 
education. On the contrary, the same elevation that 
was perceptible in Arnold’s appeal to the moral nature 
of his pupils, appeared in his treatment of their mental 
powers. The lesson that they had a work to do 
among men, was imperfect until they learned to seek 
and to employ the instruments by which their work was 
to be done. The aim of their teacher was to make 
them complete men, in whom the cause of truth would 
find able as well as devoted champions. He had his 
reward. He saw his pupils taking the places in 
which he would have them stand, upholding the good 
which he was supporting against the evil which he 
was opposing, and looking the while to him as to their 
teacher still, despite their years, their services, their 
honors. He saw others paying him virtually the same 
tribute, relying upon his guidance, rejoicing in his sym- 
pathy. But he did not see — what, indeed, could not 
be seen, while he lived — the strength imparted by his 
example to all who teach and all who learn in the 
same spirit that was in him. 

Such were the chief efforts of the English scholar to 


24 


manifest and to establish the principles on which he 
thought the truth to depend. But the truth itself, the 
truth existing in and resting upon the Christian 
Church, was still the great hope in which he lived 
and labored. It was no easy life, no easy labor. Called 
by party names which he abhorred, distrusted and 
reviled by members of the English Church, as well as 
by those of other communions, Arnold found himself 
hotly opposed, while but coldly supported. “ When 
the tide is setting strongly against us,” he said, “ we 
can scarcely expect to make progress ; it is enough if 
we do not drift along with it.” There was no relaxa- 
tion of sinew, no fainting of heart. “ The restoration 
of the Church,” he asserted, “ is indeed the best consum- 
mation of all our prayers and all our labors; it is not a 
dream, not a prospect to be seen only in the remotest 
distance ; it is possible, it lies very near us ; with God’s 
blessing, it is in the power of this very generation to 
begin and make some progress in the work.” The 
Scholar was the Churchman, the Christian, to the last. 

Arnold is gone ; and the Church of Christ remains 
divided and burdened. But every thought of charity, 
every deed of love, is helping on the elevation and the 
union of Christians. If the goal is not attained, it is 
not unattainable: the Promise has gone forth that 
“ There shall be one Fold, one Shepherd.” Amen. 

The Scholar of the Present is before you. You see 
the objects for which he has contended, you see the 


25 


obstacles to his triumph, the bewildering divisions, the 
lohg continuing struggles by which he is surrounded. 
But he has reached a point where he can stand secure. 
He is no longer the Statesman or the Schoolman, but the 
Churchman, — in a more generous term, the Christ- 
ian, — the only character that is above his own as a 
Scholar, the only one, therefore, to which his own 
should be subservient. Who doubts that he is in his 
true position at last ? Or that, though perplexities may 
arise and adversaries gather against him, he is sure to 
advance, ever stronger in battle, ever nearer to vic- 
tory ? 

In speaking thus of the Scholar of the Present, I make 
no reference to numbers of living scholars. The fact that 
they belong to our day and generation is not enough 
to make them Scholars of the Present, in our sense, that 
is, the scholars whom the age requires. Not such are 
the forms that gather but too thickly in the common 
ranks of learning. On one side droop the indolent and 
the neglectful, unconscious, perhaps incapable of the 
work before them. “ I have not fitted myself,” said an 
English scholar, “for any conversation but with the 
dead.” To men like him, the living appeal in vain. 
On another side stand the proud and the illiberal, 
whose view of their charge is but too serious, investing 
them, as it often does, with overbearing claims to supe- 
riority. Here are the quarrelsome, imagining them- 
selves the keenest sighted and the highest spirited of 
4 


26 


all, yet wasting their powers, like the wondrous wise 
hero of the bramble bush, by leaps into untenable thick- 
ets. There are the still more mistaken band of those 
who, not content with human controversies, wrestle with 
mysteries Divine. No aspect of the scholar can be 
darker than that of him who in the same breath defies 
his own littleness and the majesty of his Creator. From 
such a strife, he will never emerge, like Jacob, at “ the 
breaking of the day.” Night settles, indeed, upon all 
these scholars. Sometimes pampering, sometimes goad- 
ing their powers, always men of intellect, as they style 
themselves, trusting in their own faculties and their 
own purposes, they inspire no confidence, they meet no 
want, except amongst those as merely intellectual as 
themselves. To scholars of this class, I would not apply 
the name of Scholars of the Past, much less that of 
Scholars of the Present, 

The Scholar of the Present is of better mould. It is 
he whose heart is wise, whose scientific and literary at- 
tainments are but the stepping stones to broader and 
higher places, where the spirit soars above the mind, 
raising it, however, in its own elevation. Such a scholar 
is the true man of intellect, because he is the true man 
of soul. A profound piety is his motive impulse, teach- 
ing him that his capacities are infinitely feeble and yet 
infinitely noble, far too noble to be neglected, far too 
feeble to be perfected. At the threshold of every 
study, he encounters shapes pointing upward, and more 
and more awful, as he advances, are the indications of 


27 


a Higher Presence than merely mortal knowledge. 
Learning, in its labors and its results, is to him a sacrifice 
too solemn to be interrupted by listlessness or by pas- 
sion. Whatever may be his inquiries, he pursues them 
with as much peacefulness as zeal; whatever may be 
his convictions, he maintains them with as much gene- 
rosity as determination. His is no wish to exalt him- 
self at the expense of others, but to exalt them with 
him ; he would keep himself wise, that they may be the 
wiser, pure, that they may be the purer. He becomes 
the teacher of his household, of his neighborhood, perhaps 
of his nation, it may be of his race ; arousing them to 
the same desires which he has felt, imparting to them 
the same principles which he has matured, displaying 
to them the same prospects which he has descried. 
Amongst the schools of Italian art, was one called the 
Incamminati, or the Wayfarers. So, never staying his 
foot, nor allowing others to stay theirs in the way from 
what has been to what is to be, the Scholar of the 
Present fulfills his duty at once to the Past, the Present 
and the Future. 

Is this conception exaggerated? I appeal to any 
heart ever devoutly opening itself to learning, if it has 
not been visited by solemn yearnings and beatific vis- 
ions, nay, if it has not been endued with at least mo- 
mentary power to regenerate and to bless. Or does 
such a conception of the scholar’s mission seem a dis- 
heartening one? Does it appear to repel the laborers 
ready for the harvest by doubts of their ability to sow 
or to garner ? Not every one, indeed, can fill the long 


28 


furrow with seed, not every one can pile the broad fields 
with shocks of ripened grain. But not a single hand is 
useless; that which cannot sow can weed, that which 
cannot reap can glean; all are needed to complete the 
work of growth and of gathering in. 

Amidst the Arctic wastes, there lies, as we are told, 
an open sea. The icy barriers of the north, pierced by 
an undercurrent from southern oceans, fall away in 
yielding masses, until the penetrating waters lose their 
warmth, and rise to the surface, to pour back with ice- 
berg and floe to the great deep in which they subside. 
So into the expanse of life, learning rolls with quicken- 
ing power, breaking up all that is congealed and deso- 
late, and then returning with its trophies to the centre 
of its existence. As it ends in no single outlet, so it 
issues from no single source, but gathering its strength 
from every stream, and then to each imparting in return 
a portion of its acquisitions, it covers the earth with 
tides of knowledge and of power. Were it limited to 
any one space, were its ever continuing, ever widening 
flow restricted to particular classes or particular inter- 
ests, were any sincere cooperation rejected, any sincere 
sympathy disappointed, not only the breadth and the 
depth, but the majesty and the beneficence of learning 
would be lost. 

Youth is no bar to entrance upon the cause. The 
scholar of maturer years is likely to have the largest 
knowledge, the strictest training. On none so much as 
on him, do the interests of learning depend for prudence 


29 


or for retrospection. But when hopefulness is needed, 
when vigor is required, we may be glad to trust to 
younger spirits, 

“ And of our scholars . . . learn 

Our own forgotten lore.” 


Charles Lamb's apostrophe to “ the genius in a man’s 
natural face that has not learned his multiplication 
table,” may be seriously applied to the countenance of 
the youthful scholar, so full of genius, because so full of 
nature. The union of the young and the old can alone 
achieve the scholar’s march. It is for the young to throw 
forward the glances that give life to the array, while 
its security is assured by the backward looks of the old. 
The mountain-tops behind lost sight of, the way becomes 
uncertain; it is weary if the peaks before are not dis- 
cerned. Enlist then, young men, in the cause which calls 
you, in the cause which depends on you. 

Nowhere could you find a surer gate through which 
to enter in, than that opened for the students of this 
college. It may not seem becoming in one of the col- 
legiate body to say so, but I say it, not as a member 
so much as a stranger. What weighed the most with 
me when I was actually a stranger, what most attracted 
me to become a member of this institution, was the relig- 
ious basis on which I beheld it reared. Deep-seated 
faith set these walls in the earth; it is still filling their 
space, aiding their growth, assuring their vitality and 
their endurance. Nor could I see before I came here. 


30 


nor can I now see, the slightest tendency to exclusive- 
ness or to illiberality ; our doors stand open to every 
believer, not inviting him to be converted to our creed, 
but to be nurtured while remaining, if he will, in his 
own. Daily the prayer rises from these kneeling places 
that the college may be settled upon the firm founda- 
tions of faith and of charity. On what other founda- 
tions can the scholar labor, on what others repose? 
Springing from religion, education flows forth in all its 
fulness ; returning to religion, it crowns itself with all 
its glory. 

Students of Trinity College, be faithful to your oppor- 
tunities. Lend your ardor now to the service to which 
you may devote your maturity hereafter. Shape your 
studies according to the true ideal, and you will find 
them crowned with beauty, with happiness, with bles- 
sings without and blessings within. Be scholars, not of 
the Past, for it is gone, but of the Present that is here, 
nay, of the Future that is to come. Hear Cicero again 
urging upon you a higher allegiance than that of the 
State to which he was restricted. Hear Abelard again 
demanding of you a nobler devotedness than that of the 
School in which he was involved. Above all, hear 
Arnold again and again exhorting you to the truth for 
which he lived and in which he died, the solemn reality 
of the Church of Christ. 0 ye departed, of whom I 
have ventured to make myself the interpreter, speak 
yourselves to the living, speak of what ye have done, 
speak of what they are to do as scholars and as men ! 









• . : 1 

„4 • • ! - m ' ? 

. . • '' ■* .i 

* 

’>> * : 














0 019 851 839 6 






